Shocking words for Presbyterians

Anyone who attends one of the national church assemblies that dot the calendar every summer knows that they are highly ritualized affairs. Officers will be elected.

Political issues will be discussed. Lofty resolutions will be passed. At least one long business session will include a proposal about clergy benefits and salaries.

In recent decades, gatherings in the "seven sisters" of mainline Protestantism have also – to varying degrees – featured battles over sex. These flocks are, in descending order of size, the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Episcopal Church, the American Baptist Churches USA, the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

But as the hours pass, veterans know that they can take breaks whenever the word "greeting" appears in the agenda, marking a polite mini-speech by a visiting civic leader or religious dignitary.

But something unusual happened recently during the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). An official "ecumenical advisory delegate" – Father Siarhei Hardun of the Orthodox Church of Belarus – used his moment at the podium to deliver a message that was courteous and stunning at the same time, if not genuinely offensive to many in the audience.

"Frankly, he was pretty sly about what he said and how he said it," noted the Rev. Carmen S. Fowler, president of the conservative Presbyterian Lay Committee. "People are used to dozing off during these greetings, so this caught them off guard. ... Most of the General Assembly yawned its way through the most provocative moment of the whole event."

Speaking in clear, but careful, English, Hardun thanked the Presbyterians for the economic aid that helped Orthodox churches in his land rebuild social ministries after decades of bloody Communist persecution. Only 20 years ago, he noted, there were 370 parishes left and, today, there are more than 1500. He thanked the assembly for its kindness and hospitality.

However, the Orthodox priest ended by offering his take on the assembly's debates as it prepared for another attempt to modernize Christian doctrines on sexuality. Shortly before his "greeting" the commissioners voted 373-323 to approve, for the fifth time in two decades, the ordination of non-celibate gays and lesbians. Regional presbyteries must now approve the measure, which is the stage at which previous efforts were defeated – by increasingly smaller margins.

"Christian morality is as old as Christianity itself. It doesn't need to be invented now. Those attempts to invent new morality look for me like attempts to invent a new religion – a sort of modern paganism," said Hardun, drawing scattered applause.

"When people say that they are led and guided by the Holy Spirit to do it, I wonder if it is the same Holy Spirit that inspired the Bible, if it is the same Holy Spirit that inspires the Holy Orthodox Church not to change anything in Christian doctrine and moral standards. But if it is the same Spirit, I wonder … if there are different spirits acting in different denominations and inspiring them to develop in different directions and to create different theologies and different morals?"

The priest closed with a quote from St. Paul, urging the Presbyterians: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

Later in that business day, a slim 51 percent of the assembly voted to defeat a proposal to redefine marriage as a holy covenant between "two people," rather than one between "a man and a woman."

General Assembly moderator Cindy Bolbach – an outspoken advocate of the gay-rights measures – offered no comment whatsoever about Hardun's remarks when he left the podium, but quickly moved on to other business. However, before her election she urged her church not to fear the repercussions of an era of change. The denomination has lost half of its members since the 1960s.

"We have to learn how to proclaim the Gospel in a multicultural age where Christianity is no longer at the center," she said, in a survey of the candidates for the moderator post. "We have to learn how to tell people who have grown suspicious of institutions why an institution like the P.C. (U.S.A.) can be of value to them. ... And we have to accept the loss of the church we have always known – as the church transforms itself into something new."

Symbols in the Texas hills

KERRVILLE, Texas -- The bracelet is both simple and a bit strange, since it consists of six or seven fishing lures connected end to end. Some people look at this piece of silver or gold jewelry in the James Avery line and they see fishing lures – period.

But other shoppers see the same item and they think of these words of Jesus: "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men." This is especially true if they have completed a United Methodist Walk to Emmaus weekend, or some other renewal program inspired by the Catholic Cursillo movement.

"Most of our customers purchase and wear that for the religious symbolism," said Paul Avery, executive vice president of the company that his father started in a garage. "But there is a group that has no clue what it means. ... They just happen to like it. They like to fish or whatever."

So one man's ring of fishing lures is another man's symbol of faith.

The key is that there is an element of mystery to symbols of this kind, said another veteran of this family-driven firm based in Kerrville, an arts-friendly community in the Texas Hill Country.

"It's interesting that you would never find this in traditional church history, this symbol, but you would find the scriptural reference to being fishers of men," said Howell Ridout, the company's vice president of marketing and development.

This particular bracelet started out as a "grassroots thing that just happened," he explained. Emmaus Walk veterans "actually started using fishing tackle from the hardware store" to remind themselves of the importance of this biblical passage. Now, this modern bracelet is one of the company's most popular items.

Then again, the current catalogue also contains the very first cross that founder James Avery designed in 1954, a variation on a classic Latin design. Some of the Christian and Jewish symbolism used in this jewelry is truly ancient, while other pieces offer modern variations on biblical themes – such as a bare cross made of nails.

In recent years, Ridout explained, religious items have made up 25 percent of the company's line and about 25 percent of its sales. However, nearly 80 percent of all James Avery customers at one time or another purchase at least one item of religious jewelry. Clearly, these items are central to the company's identity, he said.

For centuries, religious symbolism has been at the heart of some forms of faith. What is unusual about the James Avery story is that almost all of the company's stores – there will be 59 by the year's end – are in the Bible Belt and 49 are in Texas.

While its customer base includes a wide range of believers, the chain could not succeed in the region in which it is succeeding without appealing to Baptists and other conservative Protestants who for generations have viewed religious symbolism as too "high church," if not too Catholic.

Then again, the Hill Country location is crucial. Its culture blends art elements from the American Midwest, from Germans settlers, from rustic ranches across the Southwestern and, of course, from Spanish influences. The result is a unique aesthetic expressed in stone, leather, wood and pounded silver.

"Texas is, geographically, a very unique area," said Paul Avery. "You have the deep Hispanic culture that is so rooted in that Catholic base. Then you have more of the Protestant side of that, the non-Catholic. And there's a blend of those two cultures that probably allows a lot of ... natural evolution."

These hills also are full of church youth camps, a network that exposed James Avery's work to young seekers as the 1960s veered into the "Jesus Movement" of the 1970s, which led into an era of charismatic renewal in mainline churches and waves of changes in how many Americans worship.

These days, art and even elements of liturgy can be found in a wide variety of Protestant sanctuaries, Ridout said. Churches of all kinds are moving in a more visual, experiential direction.

It has become common to see Texans wearing crosses – or perhaps symbolic fishing lures – as they go to work, to school, to the grocery store or to church.

"I think there are some clues there, both as to what is acceptable and to what's sought after and comfortable," Ridout said. These changes symbolize "what's meaningful to people, what truly motivates them."

When did Baptists stop making news?

The Southern Baptist Convention has passed scores of blunt resolutions in recent decades urging America's leaders to reject the sexual revolution and defend marriage as the sacred union of one man and one woman. But something different happened during this summer's convention. In a jolting statement on the divorce crisis, leaders from America's largest non-Catholic flock looked in the mirror and decided that their own sins were just as bad as everyone else's sins.

"Studies have indicated that conservative Protestants ... are divorcing at the same rate, if not at higher rates, than the general population," stated the resolution, which passed unanimously. Other studies indicate that areas in which "Southern Baptist churches predominate in number often have higher divorce rates than areas we would define as 'unchurched.' "

In other words, Southern Baptists have "been prophetic in confronting assaults in the outside culture on God's design for marriage while rarely speaking with the same alarm and force to a scandal that has become all too commonplace in our own churches."

The convention urged its churches to walk their conservative talk by offering improved premarital counseling, by uniting in marriage "only those who are biblically qualified to be married" and by intensifying efforts to heal broken unions.

Press coverage of this text was next to nonexistent. Media coverage was light of a strong SBC statement on corporate sin and the environment, in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The convention also approved, after some emotional debates, a sweeping program to change key elements of its national structure and finances.

This is the stuff of national news, noted religion-beat veteran Jeffrey Weiss, writing for Politics Daily. The question is why this SBC gathering received so little attention, while gatherings in the 1980s and '90s created waves of ink.

Back then, he noted, the "pressroom would be packed by wire service reporters, writers from large and not-so-large newspapers from across the South, and from most of the top 10 largest papers not in the South. This time, I can find evidence of exactly five representatives of the secular media in attendance. ...

"Which leads to this question: Did the SBC get too much attention back in the day, or is it getting too little attention now? My answer to both: Probably so."

Of course, the troubled state of the news business played a role. There are fewer journalists on the religion beat and there are fewer travel dollars to invest in covering subjects other than those most editors consider holy, such as politics and sports.

At the same time, the era of intense coverage of Southern Baptist life coincided with what journalists perceived as a major change in American politics – the growth of the religious right. Journalists took note when the nation's largest Protestant body spoke out on abortion, gay rights, the ordination of women, Hollywood's influence on families and the need for evangelism around the world, including among Jewish believers.

Hot buttons were being pushed, year after year.

"Atop those reader-friendly news hooks, we had the 25-year internal battle between what we always called 'conservatives' and 'moderates.' That fight ended with the conservatives in firm control of the denominational leadership and the moderates purged at about the same time the Republican Party was becoming increasingly defined by a publicly political conservative Christian base," noted Weiss.

In other words, more politics.

These days, the SBC is primarily wrestling with issues of theology and polity, especially the culture's slide into a post-denominational age in which people are increasingly moving into congregations that strive to avoid putting a brand name – think "Southern Baptist" – on their signs. People are drifting back and forth across hazy doctrinal lines that used to be clearly defined.

This is a giant story and, in part, is what that reorganization plan is about – granting more independence to churches, clergy and donors in an attempt to pull the old Southern Baptist tent a bit closer to contemporary megachurch realities.

Consider, noted Weiss, the news value of this dramatic plan to restructure "its organization and the way it funds missionaries – which was the main reason the SBC was formed in the first place. How dramatic? Imagine if your city decided it would let people send some of their tax money to those programs they particularly liked."

Imagine that. That's would be news, wouldn't it?

Catholic dad's fight against abuse

It wasn't hard to connect the dots when, after decades of lurid news about the sexual abuse of the young, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger delivered a Good Friday sermon bemoaning "how much filth" was in the church, including "the priesthood." Weeks after that signal in 2005, the cardinal became pope. Then at World Youth Day 2008, he said, "I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured. ... These misdeeds, which constitute so grave a betrayal of trust, deserve unequivocal condemnation."

The pope's recent letter to Irish Catholics also made headlines, of course. After new cries for repentance, Benedict XVI told the victims: "I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured. Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated. Many of you found that, when you were courageous enough to speak of what happened to you, no one would listen. ... It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church."

All of these words were spoken in public and, thus, led to debates and discussions around the world. However, in recent months tuned-in Catholics have been reading about a private, strategic statement – by a Catholic layman – that may have had the greatest practical impact in American sanctuaries. The St. Louis Beacon, an independent online newspaper, recently published the document.

The 10-page memo (.pdf here) was written by David Spotanski, vice chancellor of the Diocese of Belleville in Southern Illinois, and given to his bishop on Feb. 22, 2002.

It's crucial that Bishop Wilton D. Gregory had recently become president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops – just as another wave of abuse reports hit the news. When the bishop began scanning the document, Spotanski took it back and read it aloud, behind closed doors.

"The truth is that our bishops are not doing all they CAN to stop sexual abuse of minors by their brother priests; they're doing all they CARE TO," wrote Spotanski. "Like most Catholics I'm stunned and horrified that there's a distinction. ... For a Church that can be so outspoken and uncompromising about the splinters in the eyes of our culture, She has apparently for decades hypocritically concealed a plank in Her own eye from which one could hew an ark."

In addition to handing the bishop the memo, Spotanski provided a photo of his daughter and two sons, who were 14, 11 and 9 when it was taken. He then placed a copy of the photo in Gregory's briefcase before every major meeting the bishop attended that year – including a face-to-face meeting between Pope John Paul II and the president of the U.S. Catholic bishops. Gregory also met with Cardinal Ratzinger and other top Vatican officials.

This led to a crucial Vatican summit on the abuse crisis and, eventually, much tougher policies to protect children in American churches.

While that charter didn't take every action advised by Spotanski, noted commentator Ross Douthat, it's safe to say that "while the princes of the American church were immobilized by denial ... the rough draft of the policy that righted the ship was being written by a middle-aged layman in the Midwest, in consultation with the Catholic dads on his local softball team."

The New York Times columnist, who is an active Catholic, called Spotanski, the "man who saved American Catholicism."

If so, the key to the memo was its blunt, personal tone and its emphasis on the damage done to the lives and faith of ordinary Catholic children and their parents. For example, Spotanski asked, what Jesus would say to a cardinal who has "shown himself to be dishonest about his knowledge of the forcible anal rape of children?" He then quoted a bishop as observing, "I don't think I'd like hell very much."

Most of all, he argued, Catholic bishops needed to start thinking about their own vows and the church's future and, thus, stop treating victims like "lepers, sinners, nuisances or threats." At some point, faithful Catholics would close their hearts and their checkbooks.

When that happened, warned Spotanski, bishops in "tainted dioceses" would have to "choose between their missions and their mansions, their food buses and their limousines, the 'least of their brothers' and Brooks Brothers. ... The depleted bottom line is that you simply can't run a major American archdiocese for very long on 30 silver coins."